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Physical Review A

Improving coherent atomic vapor optical buffers

Andrey B. Matsko, Dmitry Strekalov, Anatoliy A. Savchenkov, Lute Maleki

Published Jul 9, 2007• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

We report on a theoretical study of the influence of incoherent optical pumping and beam profiling on slow light propagation in three-level atomic vapor. The pumping reduces the residual unwanted absorption of the signal while destroying the atomic coherence and increasing the group velocity of light. We show that the pumping enhances the resulting group delay for a certain range of parameters. We also examine changing the cross section of the beam of light along the propagation direction by, e.g., focusing the beam, for the purpose of maintaining the drive intensity to effectively counter its absorption.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.76.013806

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We report on a theoretical study of the influence of incoherent optical pumping and beam profiling on slow light propagation in three-level atomic vapor. The pumping reduces the residual unwanted absorption of the signal while destroying the atomic coherence and increasing the group velocity of light. We show that the pumping enhances the resulting group delay for a certain range of parameters. We also examine changing the cross section of the beam of light along the propagation direction by, e.g., focusing the beam, for the purpose of maintaining the drive intensity to effectively counter its absorption.
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The effect of enhanced dispersion with suppressed absorption due to optical coherence and quantum interference in multilevel atomic systems has attracted great attention in recent years.1,2 Although many theoretical papers have been published on this subject, few experiments have been reported. Harris and co-workers demonstrated suppression of absorption in Pb atomic vapor with a coherent pumping field in a three-level cascade system.3 Recently, they performed an experiment to reduce group velocity of a laser pulse in the same multilevel system of Pb atomic vapor by inducing optical coherence between another transition that shares one level with the transition near resonance with the probe beam.4
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